


Old Time's Sake

by sahiya



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Regeneration, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-11
Updated: 2010-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:40:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahiya/pseuds/sahiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor did not want to see Jack - but we've long ago established that the universe hates him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Time's Sake

**Author's Note:**

> I confess that I didn't realize until this was done that it would work for the "identity" challenge at [](http://community.livejournal.com/wintercompanion/profile)[**wintercompanion**](http://community.livejournal.com/wintercompanion/), but I think it fits well anyway! Thanks to [](http://fuzzyboo03.livejournal.com/profile)[**fuzzyboo03**](http://fuzzyboo03.livejournal.com/) for the beta and [](http://kivrin.livejournal.com/profile)[**kivrin**](http://kivrin.livejournal.com/) for encouragement. SPOILERS for "Waters of Mars," both halves of "The End of Time," and obliquely for "Children of Earth."

The Doctor did not want to see Jack.

Quite truthfully, he didn't want to see any of his old companions, past, present, _or_ future, but he especially did not want to see Jack. Of all of the people he didn't want to see, Jack was the first, and, unfortunately, also the most likely. Statistically-speaking, he had a higher chance of running into Jack, given that there were bound to be more of him than anyone else out there. Lots of Jacks in the universe, running around being heroically annoying and shagging their way through time and space.

The Doctor did not want to see Jack, so of course the first person he saw when he tumbled out of the TARDIS, fresh from a snow-dusted street in mid-twenty-first century London and the realization that he was going to die, probably very soon, and Lord of Time or no, he couldn't stop it, and he shouldn't, he'd just got through proving he was a rubbish god - of _course_ the first person he saw was Jack bloody Harkness. Not his Jack, at least. But _a_ Jack, and that was bad enough.

This Jack had gray hair - not a lot, but some. It suited. He'd collected a couple lines, too, at the corners of his eyes. The Doctor ruthlessly suppressed a pang of envy. He'd hoped he might live long enough in this body to get some gray hairs and lines himself, it'd been a long time since he'd had those, and even longer since he'd earned them. This Jack looked tired, too, and that sat less well on him than the gray hairs, but it wasn't the exhausted, strung out tired of fresh grief that the Doctor had feared. He looked like he'd reached the end of a long day, and was glad to be sitting at the bar with a pint of the local lager in front of him.

The Doctor was still hanging half out of the TARDIS, wondering where and when he was; he'd hit the randomizer button, and all he knew was that he'd landed in a dark corner of a dim bar with a very diverse clientele. He was sorely tempted to just go back inside and shut the door, but Jack looked over his shoulder and caught his eye and it was too late. The Doctor flinched in anticipation of a pint glass being hurled at his head, but instead Jack smiled and gestured to the empty bar stool next to him, where a second pint of lager sat untouched. "Hey, Doc. Have a seat."

The Doctor smiled, or at least felt his lips curve up to expose his teeth. "Sorry, Jack!" he chirped. "No time!" He leaned back to slam the door shut - and found it wouldn't close. Jack's boot was in the way.

"You said you'd say that," Jack said.

The Doctor glowered. "Oh, did I."

"Yeah. You also said you'd be a 'stubborn git,' but that I was to ignore that and make you have a pint with me."

The Doctor gritted his teeth. "And if I don't?"

Jack shrugged. "Probably nothing. But I'll have wasted three credits on the beer." He smiled, charmingly, and the Doctor watched in fascination as the years fell away from his face. "C'mon, Doc. For old time's sake." He grinned, as though at some private joke.

The Doctor went. He sat. He sipped his beer and wondered when he would learn not to hit the bloody randomizer when he was in certain moods. The TARDIS had strange ideas about the definition of _comforting._

"So, Jack," the Doctor said, after the first bitter swallow of beer. "What's this about?"

Jack grinned again. "I have a message."

The Doctor felt his lip curl. "From my future self."

"Got it in one. He said to tell you . . ." Jack cleared his throat and straightened on his barstool. "'It's not so bad.'" Then he shrugged, allowed his shoulders to fall, and took a long draught of beer.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. Some message. Of course his future self would say that. He was perfectly happy to be whoever he was - well, most of the time - but he wouldn't know who that was until he became him, and he was quite tired of the whole exercise. He'd got these trainers broken in just in time to ditch them for Doc Martens or combat boots or - _Rassilon_ \- loafers with bloody _tassels_. If he was immortal, and he supposed there wasn't any reason he couldn't be, silly rules about twelve regenerations having gone out the window with everything else, he thought he would at least like to keep the same face. Like Jack.

"Right," the Doctor said, shoving his beer away and pushing back from the counter. "Well, now that you've delivered your message, I'll be off. People to see and planets to save, you know how it goes."

"Not so fast." Jack laid an implacable hand on the Doctor's shoulder to keep him seated. "I have something else to say."

Here it came. Whatever _it_ was. The Doctor drew a deep breath. "And what would that be?"

Jack forced him to look him in the eye. "Thank you."

The Doctor blinked. Then he blinked again. "For what?"

Jack smiled. "Alonso."

The Doctor stared a bit, then rubbed the back of his head. "Alonso? I don't - wait, you mean the bloke from the _Titanic_?"

Jack nodded. "I'd lost everything and then I found him. And then," he shrugged, "I'd still lost everything. I'd still done terrible things I couldn't bear to think about at night. But he made it hurt less, and that -" he drew a deep breath - "that meant everything to me at the time. So." He lifted his glass to the Doctor. "Thank you."

The Doctor shook his head. "Haven't done it yet."

"I know. But I wanted to thank this you, and I don't think you had a lot of time left when you did it."

"Ah," the Doctor said. He wrapped his hands around the cold, damp pint glass to keep them from shaking. "You know, then. That I'm about to die."

"Yeah," Jack said.

"I don't want to."

Jack sighed. "Yeah. I know that, too." He shrugged. "I don't know if it'll help, but the next you was right - it's not so bad. He's you in all the ways that matter." Jack smiled, then - but not _at_ the Doctor, in fact he was pretty sure it wasn't a smile that was meant to be seen; probably Jack didn't even know he'd done it. But he smiled and the Doctor realized something crucial about the Jack sitting beside him.

This Jack was not in love with him.

Oh, he was certainly in love with _a_ Doctor - _his_ Doctor. But the Doctor wasn't his Doctor. Not yet. Maybe it was his next self, or maybe one further down the line - probably both. The specifics didn't matter. What mattered was that the Doctor wasn't this Jack's Doctor any more than this Jack was the Doctor's Jack.

The realization released a painful knot of tension in the Doctor's back. The Doctor had got used to Jack being in love with him, but it was only slightly less discomfiting than the way Jack made Time squirm, albeit for totally different reasons. But this Jack didn't feel that way about the Doctor at all. In fact, the Doctor suspected that this Jack didn't like him very much.

He kept his mouth shut for once as they finished their pints. Jack stood, his coat - surely not the same coat, but a very similar one - falling into place around his ankles. "Well, Doc. I'll be seeing you."

"So it would seem," the Doctor said dryly. He cleared his throat. "Are you in a hurry? We could -"

"Nah. I've got a date to keep." Jack smiled. "But thanks for asking. Keep doing that, by the way - one of these days, I promise I'll say yes."

The Doctor nodded. He watched Jack thread his way between the tables and the patrons till he disappeared through a half-hidden side-door. Then he took a deep breath and turned away, toward the TARDIS and his future, however short it might be.

***

Four days, thirteen hours, forty-two minutes, and thirty-nine seconds later, the Doctor died.

Then he crashed the TARDIS. Again.

***

He woke up in his bed, groggy, but alert enough to know that he shouldn't have woken up in his bed. He should have woken up on the floor of the console room, grating imprints all over his brand new face. Not that he didn't prefer the bed, but he wasn't sure how he'd got there, and that was always a bit unnerving.

Slowly he raised his hand from beneath the covers. He re-confirmed the presence of ten fingers, even if they felt like twice that, then touched his face. Nose and lips and eyes and ears were all accounted for, and an appropriate number of each. He counted his teeth with his tongue, and wriggled his toes, and peeked beneath the blankets to make sure all the other necessary bits were present. Then he reached up and patted his head, running his fingers through the bewildering amount of hair he'd been gifted with this time around. He could cut it, he supposed, but that just felt like cheating.

"It'll take you a while to get used to it," Jack's voice said. The Doctor looked up to see him lounging in the doorway, a very promising tray of tea and what the Doctor dearly hoped were ginger nut biscuits (not chocolate, not this time, it seemed) in hand and a very fond smile on his lips. And it was not just any Jack.

"You had a date to keep," the Doctor said, the words strange and foreign in his new mouth.

Jack nodded. He pushed off the doorway with his hip and set the tray on the bedside table. He sat down on the edge of the bed and brushed the Doctor's considerable fringe off his forehead with a practiced, familiar hand. It should have felt invasive, but he did it so naturally, as though he'd done it a thousand times before, that it was simply a comfort. "That I did. Tea?"

"Please," the Doctor said, struggling upright on the bed. Jack helped him get propped up, then poured him a cup of fragrant English Breakfast, sweetened with honey and brimming with everything the Doctor needed to get the still-blinkered bits of his brain back online. He sipped and felt instantly better - clearer, cleverer, more _himself_. Whoever that was now. He still hadn't seen a mirror, but somehow it didn't bother him. Not with Jack here, looking at him like that.

Jack's hand came to rest on the Doctor's foot, rubbing it absently through the covers. The Doctor wriggled his toes and Jack's smile widened. He rubbed the arch a little with his thumb. The Doctor wished there weren't so many covers in the way of Jack giving him a proper footrub.

"So," Jack said, passing him the plate of biccies, "were we right?"

The Doctor didn't pretend to misunderstand. He sipped his tea and gave it some thought. "I don't know yet," he said at last. "Perhaps." He cast his mind's eye over the last day his former self had lived. How irrational he had been about the whole thing. Overwrought. Raging against the dying of the light was all well and good, but truly - it was rather embarrassing. "Yes," he decided. "It was time."

Jack nodded. Neither of them spoke, allowing the silence to stretch and deepen. The Doctor felt no need to fill it. He nibbled at a biscuit and realized he was going to have a terrible sweet tooth - possibly as bad as his fourth self's, though at the moment the mere notion of Jelly Babies made him faintly nauseated.

When all that was left of the biscuits were crumbs, Jack sighed, his hand stilling on the Doctor's foot. "I can't stay."

The Doctor looked up. "Why not?" he asked, trying not to sound like a petulant five year old. He thought he just managed it, though some of his disappointment might have leaked through.

Jack smiled. "Because I didn't."

"You didn't - oh."

Jack gave the Doctor's big toe a gentle squeeze between thumb and forefinger. "Next time you see me, I'll be younger. And a bit . . . shattered."

The Doctor looked him in the eye. "And you'll need a Doctor to put you together again?"

Jack shrugged. "Something like that. More of a patch job, but it'll hold. Don't worry - we take turns."

The Doctor smiled faintly. He relinquished his teacup, and Jack set it and the plate back on the tray. "Do you need anything else before I go?" Jack asked.

The Doctor started to shake his head, but then his fringe flopped down into his face and he nodded. "A mirror, if you please."

Jack fetched him an old-fashioned hand-mirror with a wooden frame from the loo. The Doctor held it up and saw himself for the first time. There was the fringe, of course, and he would have to trim it at some point or it would become a hazard. Beneath it were eyes that looked green but which he suspected might be brown under certain circumstances, and then a nose of normal size and some very nice cheekbones - brilliant, he'd enjoyed having nice cheekbones - and a wide mouth made for smiling.

All of it was very smooth. Unblemished. Young.

"Like it?" Jack asked.

"Hmm," the Doctor said noncommittally. He looked up. "Do you?"

Jack's smile softened. "I love it. Be seeing you, Doc."

He turned and left. The Doctor lay down and held the mirror up so it reflected his face, tilting it to catch all the angles. It was not particularly flattering - no one ever looked his best lying flat on his back - but that was all right. He had seen himself reflected in Jack's eyes first, and now he knew. He _knew_.

This was going to be a good life - no. A fantastic one, a _brilliant one_. He could feel it in his bones.

_Fin._


End file.
